Stunning Starry Nights of Lincoln Harrison

byJohn WilliamsonJuly 13, 2012

[Spoiler] I guarantee that these spectacular swirls of color will have you wasting a good chunk of your Friday. But well worth it.

Victoria, Australia-based photographer Lincoln Harrison has been taking pictures for just two years. Harrison says his images are created by taking one shot during twilight and then up to 500 shots in complete darkness throughout the night. Harrison says most of his pictures are of star trails and landscapes usually around Lake Eppalock in Victoria, Australia.

“Locations are chosen in pretty much the same way as I would choose landscape locations,” says Harrison. “I just drive or walk around until I see something that looks good.”

After Harrison returns from his night shoot, he processes the image in Adobe Photoshop, stacking the images using the lighten and blend modes, to create his spectacular images. He then adds the twilight image, sometimes shot using HDR (High Dynamic Range) and a combination of layer masks.

His favorite? At the moment Wormhole. You can see more of his incredible images at his website or at 500px.com

John Williams is owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA's Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A long-time science writer and space enthusiast, he created award-winning Hubble Star Cards. Use coupon code UNIVERSE to Hold the Universe in your hands. Follow John on Twitter @terrazoom.

Yes, they’ve been extensively manipulated. It may be art but it ain’t reality. We’re getting so used to this manipulation that many people don’t know, and don’t know that they don’t know, what reality looks like. On a recent trip to an observatory where people got a look through an 85″ telesope aimed at a nearby galaxy, almost everyone was disappointed because it didn’t look like a Hubble photo, which are heavily manipulated.

Guys, guys! In this case there is no reality! FFS, this is NOT valid criticism. I am the first to criticise excessive manipulation of a real scene, but there is no real scene in this case! This is valid work. Fantastic work.

How about when a ‘science’ show portrays a view of Valles Marineris on Mars where the vertical is so distorted that the canyon walls look vertical and the canyon three miles wide. Shown without saying that the view is distorted. Dramatic license, I suppose. Isn’t that manipulating reality? And *every* visual depiction of the asteroid belt shows a crowded jumble of rocks when, in fact, if you were on an asteroid in the middle of the asteroid belt you would not see a single other asteroid as more than a distant point of light.
There *is* an objective reality and if you’re going to show it in a modified form it should be made clear that is what you’re doing.

“starry night” is right. some of them really look like a van gogh. in the one with multiple images, i especially like the second one from the left of the top row. nature is the greatest artist of them all.

Wonderful photoshops. Perhaps you could use a futuristic Cafe setting with accentuated 3D perspective. Use HDR to the max. Put in a moon with some sort of manipulation. Van Gogh also used more greens. The water looks great.